O.W.

“DIALOG” and other conversations

September 4, 2017 | O.W.

Time flies so fast when you’re in a good company. It’s hard to believe we’ve already spent 4 days at the European Academy Berlin. Today, we had a unique opportunity to visit the editorial board of a Polish-German magazine “DIALOG” and talk to one of the editors, Ms Sabine Stekel. She has shortly presented the history of the magazine and then took our questions regarding the Polish-German relations, the journalism in both countries, the freedom of speech and so on. Even though the meeting had to be translated from German to English, and some of the information probably got lost in translation, we still learned a lot and found the meeting really productive. Afterwards we met a representative of the Foundation for Polish-German cooperation, who gave us some information about the foundation she works for and also answered a lot of our questions. Then our team headed off to the Czech Center in Berlin to explore its activities and discuss the situation with the Czech media. Many of us were struck by the ominous architecture of the Czech embassy building. As it turned out, it was constructed with the idea of showing that it can withstand military attacks which gives it quite a gloomy look. At the Czech center we got a short introduction by the centre director Tomas Sacher who revealed that there are a lot of cultural activities organized by the organization such as language courses, cultural festivals, discussions and even small concerts with young musicians. Mr Sacher, who also had some experience in journalistic writing before working for the center, provided us with very insightful highlights about the Czech media landscape. We got a chance to shortly discuss the evolution of the modern media forms and how newspapers struggle with retaining their audience. As much as we’d have liked to have a deeper discussion the time was unfortunately limited, so we moved to a discussion with our next speaker, Ms Yasmina Banaszczuk. We talked about fake news, post truth, hate speech and propaganda. Afterwards, we had a little bit of free time in the city, so we’ve done some sightseeing and went back to the Academy for dinner. At the end of the day we gathered to talk about the highlilghts